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Reasons to read fiction: Entertainment and Empathy.
Emily Dickinson famously claimed, “there is no frigate like a book.” Indeed. In The Night
Manager, Louise Erdrich invites us to travel to a Chippewa reservation in the 1950s. Not only
to travel there but to stay awhile. With delicately selected, artfully arranged words, she creates
moving pictures. And eccentric, lovely, full-bodied characters that pop to life on the page, and
make their twisted way into your heart. To live there awhile is to feel the full weight and sorrow
of this tribe’s loss of homeland and culture and way of life. The scrappiness of the people, in
spite of the everyday humiliations and deprivations they endured. Strike that. Endure. And yet,
and yet. Somehow, this remnant of a tribe survives, and their survival is triumphant. Erdrich
belongs to that special breed of novelist whose fiction is poetic. Or maybe it is that her poetic
voice makes its way into even the grittiest of her fictional worlds, such as life on a reservation
in the 1950s, one of American racism’s heydays.